Games Journalism General

[ZMOT]

Seriously, Mercante needs a lolcow thread and she needs it yesterday.

nah, she's really just a run-of-the-mill BPD attentionwhore, no need to give her the validation. once this blows over eventually no one is gonna give a fuck about her anymore anyway.
otherwise any related info is already in this thread, it's not like you need much more info than "kotaku games 'journalist'" anyway.

The gaming industry is a dumpster fire right now cause gamers are the ultimate consumers and have 0 impulse control. Go look at the suicide squad forum on steam. "I heard this game is bad, but it's only 25 bucks so I bought it." You shouldn't fucking reward back practices period.

for now. good luck eating those when then economy crashes to correct itself...

 

[Jaimas]

It's so interesting isn't it? The response to this and Sweet Baby. They fear transparency. But why don't they want you to know where they have been? They're afraid of you. If you knew you might stop consuming. The course has been clear to me for years now: starve the beast. Stop buying games.

The bigger issue (for them) is that if you track them, you'll realize something every Autist who followed the events of 2014 noticed: That these assholes keep popping up, over and over and over again. Different roles, but same assholes. In fact, here, I'll do a fucking hit-and-run covering a greatest-hits list of just three of the ones involved:

Carolyn Petit: Former Kotaku Writer. Now works for Vice. Currently has a thread. An absolute loon who lusted for the career relevance of Leigh Alexander and never got it. Was eventually fired from Feminist Frequency and then was re-hired by Kotaku. Fucking unhinged, has literally never had a coherent gaming review in the entire time they wrote on games, often sperging out on political angles that have nothing the fuck to do with the game or its content (for example, sperging out at length about the game being transphobic because the setting is one where you can cyber yourself to be whatever the fuck you want and Petit looks like someone's dad).

Luke Plunkett: Literally fucking wrote Kotaku's article in the "Gamers Are Dead" article barrage that started GG, though it basically copied Leigh Alexander's verbatim. Decided to openly go full anti-Japanese racist after Nintendo, fed up with Kotaku's shit, blacklsited them from receiving review copies of games. Launched into screeds about how people who didn't like Call of Duty were idiots while his site was running COD Promos. Helped publicly lead an attack against the Kickstarter campaign of the lighthearted card game Tentacle Bento and got it taken down, while promoting the lewd Kickstarter project of an affiliate. Was one of the assholes screaming about how offensive that a history-based game centered in Medieval Hungary didn't have black people in it. Wrote the same fucking article on Project Cars like 15 times.

Maya Kramer: Was the person behind DDOS-ing the Fine Young Capitalists, which, paired with Zoe Quinn agitating, led to their sponsors pulling out and would have resulted in a game jam intended to help new female game developers get a game made - 4chan then swept in and saved them by raising and donating enough capital for the project to succeed. Was Zoe Quinn's connection at Silverstring Media, Feminist Frequency's corporate parent. IRL friend of both Zoe Quinn and Anita. Actively helped shut down criticism of both in both 2012 (during Anita's KS) and 2014 (when Zoe's bullshit came out due to Eron Gjoni) and was the one who advocated using the "blame Wizardchan for everything" defense. Currently works at Sweet Baby, Inc, where she takes great joy in making everything worse for everyone.

Gee, I can't fucking imagine why they don't want you able to track them with a stellar portfolio like this.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Are faggots and retards arguing about video games going to gut what's left of the free internet? Or is this more a matter of the censoring faggots demonstrating how fucked things already are?

It's not even about video games. GamerGate 1 was started because a journo was fucking the subject of his articles and didn't want to disclose that. GamerGate 2 was people noticing that any game consultancy firms touch turns to shit. The "games" part is almost incidental.

It bothers me that I've written about like 90% of the people on that fucking list at some point or another for this website.

These clowns fucking get around.

I had to double take when I saw Legobutts and TransLifeLine come up in relation to SBI. It's baffling how they all haven't been memory holed and blacklisted from the entire industry.


Edit:

Carolyn Petit: Former Kotaku Writer.

Also worked for GameSpot and arguably was patient zero for woke game journos when she complained The Third Birthday was sexist.

Luke Plunkett

Thanks. Got to add this to the OP.

 

[winterfag]

I'm sure most people hearing about such a blog would think "Oh neat, these games journalists were able to get careers in this field they're all passionate about!"

kotaku biting back just makes it immediately obvious how they got these jobs

 

[Kheapathic]

It’s a pity how many people gave them money as kids.

I'd say it's excusable depending on how old and what-not you were growing up. Back in my day, when all we had were magazines, you could say they're in the developer's pocket and thus won't write anything too negative, but they didn't seem to have this burning disdain for their job or the people who read their shit. Once everything started going to the Internet, where every inch on a page wasn't an issue and advertising became easier, the standards dropped, because every article/review/etc had its own infinite MS Word file and its own set of built-in ads. Then, when they found out that hate clicks are just as good as honest clicks, you don't even need to care what you're writing about. Just do a Nina Panini (or whatever her name was) and write an opening sentence then link a YouTube video, congratulations, you're a fucking videogame journalist.

 

[Punished Brent]

Why are they ashamed of their own body of work to the extent they need to get rid of it?

 

[newdumb]

How dare you repost publicly available information that I've made public by virtue of being a public figure?!

 

[genericwhitemale]

That Nic Calandra guy seems like such an obnoxious little cocksucker. And what's worse is he's the former Editor-In-Chief of Escapist and current head of Second Wind, home to Yahtzee Croshaw. Yahtzee is someone who I still watch to this day and enjoy his reviews and think pieces. When he left the Escapist after 16 years last November, it was after Calandra got let go because the people who run the Escapist are incompetent and made unreasonable demands. I watched an interview with him and the Stuttering Craig guy who interviewed DSP at at one point (because I think Stuttering Craig leans more towards anti-woke, although I could be wrong) they started talking about politics in games journalism - on a side note, apparently the former EIC of The Escapist before Nic was fired because he "defended" GamerGate even after writing a grovelling article condeming it, because his position was that Zoe Quinn isn't the main victim and said as much to her on Twitter. You'd have to go back and rewatch the video, but I remember him specifically saying that he didn't want to inject politics into Second Wind. So I thought "okay, this guy seems like a decent EIC. He's just going to shut up and do his job from the sidelines." Fast forward a couple months and he's obsessed with all the GamerGate 2.0 people like Mark Kern and this guy. Very disappointing to see.

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

Wix has taken down @SmashJT's website for Kotaku Identified, a blog which tracked games journalists who moved on from Kotaku including to video game development. They've mass-reported his blog for privacy invasions, so Wix stole his domain and the archive of his entire blog.

Alyssa Mercante is gloating how Nick Calandra is a good ally that got rid of the anti-Kotaku website while looking for a lawyer to lolyer up.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Bitch you ARE white, the fuck?? These people are actually delusional, it would be even more funny if their retarded ideas didn’t have institutional backing.

She's white when she needs to be. It's not a delusion, it's a fucking bait and switch.

Gee, I can't fucking imagine why they don't want you able to track them with a stellar portfolio like this.

In Liz Fong-Jones's thread, we learned he works with a company that helps clients hide their embarrassing information. Sort of like an anti Kiwi Farms. We expose hypocrisy and retardation, they want to actively cover it up.

 

[Nigger Caviar]

It's really hard to overstate how few people know how to competently self-host. The fact that all major hosting platforms are incredibly pozzed significantly harms freedom of information and the average person's ability to publish.

Hope I'm not getting too off topic but what are some good resources to learn that?

 

[blablabla]

Wix has taken down @SmashJT's website for Kotaku Identified, a blog which tracked games journalists who moved on from Kotaku including to video game development. They've mass-reported his blog for privacy invasions, so Wix stole his domain and the archive of his entire blog.

everyone involved in this controversy should kill themselves

 

[Frosted Snowflakes]

In Liz Fong-Jones's thread, we learned he works with a company that helps clients hide their embarrassing information. Sort of like an anti Kiwi Farms. We expose hypocrisy and retardation, they want to actively cover it up.

Someone should do a secret undercover on those journalists, like how Steven Crowder did a few undercovers to expose the ugly truth.

 

[Riot Guard]

Hope I'm not getting too off topic but what are some good resources to learn that?

Luke Smith has a bunch of tutorials about the topic and a whole website dedicated to it.
Luke Smith - Internet Independence
https://landchad.net/
Be warned that some of them are old and from before Epik lost their minds so you will need a different registrar.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I'd say it's excusable depending on how old and what-not you were growing up. Back in my day, when all we had were magazines, you could say they're in the developer's pocket and thus won't write anything too negative, but they didn't seem to have this burning disdain for their job or the people who read their shit. Once everything started going to the Internet, where every inch on a page wasn't an issue and advertising became easier, the standards dropped, because every article/review/etc had its own infinite MS Word file and its own set of built-in ads. Then, when they found out that hate clicks are just as good as honest clicks, you don't even need to care what you're writing about. Just do a Nina Panini (or whatever her name was) and write an opening sentence then link a YouTube video, congratulations, you're a fucking videogame journalist.

And getting into games journalism for clout or to springboard to a MSM career wasn't really a thing back then. Politics was the realm of news junkies, not something that had to be virtue signalled 24/7.

 

[gayMIGAman]

Is the publicly available information on Mercante accurate? It was claimed her sister, Alana, worked at New York Institute of Technology, and there is an "Alana Mercante" on their employee page with an email and phone number. There is also an article from the student newspaper of a Quaker secondary school called "Friends Academy" which interviews an Alana Mercante and mentions that she was previously employed at NYIT. Finally, the doxbin makes mention of a "Michael Mercante" who also lives in New York, and you can find a "Ginamarie and Mike Mercante" on the Friends Academy 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 annual report under "Gifts by Present and Former Colleagues". Do we know that this Alana is her sister?

 

[Glowing In The Streets]

Instead of Wix, he should have used the kiwi farms!

 

[Kheapathic]

"Targeted Harassment" is such a fucking weasel word; and while I'm not a lawyer, I would assume "harassment" requires specific action, like seeking out and engaging with said person to annoy, pester, etc them. But they're going after the dude who was tracking Taylor Swift's jet.

 

[Fatpacks]

Eternal reminder that God allows journos and other such scum to reign over the world and control culture as they see fit while we are on the brink of total obliteration and living in a perpetual state of absolute misery.

Well I guess Wix is on the shit list. Once again, the free internet shrinks.

Total Journo and Censorship Victory.

We're never gonna make it, are we?

If Yahtzee goes woke then stop the planet and let me off right now.

It's 2024. Everything will go woke, or die. Including every one of us. It's a shitty reality but there's really nothing we can do anymore.

View attachment 6027456

This picture is a perfect summation of what our future will look like:

• SJW overlords take down a website/platform that goes against their eternal rule
• SJW overlords openly gloat about it on social media while billions of niggercattle clap like seals over our demise
• Those complicit in the deplatforming achieve higher status so that they can enact more censorship
• Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum, until all opposition has completely vanished of the face of the earth

 

[Jaimas]

That Nic Calandra guy seems like such an obnoxious little cocksucker. And what's worse is he's the former Editor-In-Chief of Escapist and current head of Second Wind, home to Yahtzee Croshaw. Yahtzee is someone who I still watch to this day and enjoy his reviews and think pieces. When he left the Escapist after 16 years last November, it was after Calandra got let go because the people who run the Escapist are incompetent and made unreasonable demands. I watched an interview with him and the Stuttering Craig guy who interviewed DSP at at one point (because I think Stuttering Craig leans more towards anti-woke, although I could be wrong) they started talking about politics in games journalism - on a side note, apparently the former EIC of The Escapist before Nic was fired because he "defended" GamerGate even after writing a grovelling article condeming it, because his position was that Zoe Quinn isn't the main victim and said as much to her on Twitter. You'd have to go back and rewatch the video, but I remember him specifically saying that he didn't want to inject politics into Second Wind. So I thought "okay, this guy seems like a decent EIC. He's just going to shut up and do his job from the sidelines." Fast forward a couple months and he's obsessed with all the GamerGate 2.0 people like Mark Kern and this guy. Very disappointing to see.

Back when GG happened, Quinn's IRL friends and orbiters immediately crusaded to defend M'lady, and none of those crusaders were louder or more ardent than the Escapist's most well-known pair of diabetics: Jim Sterling and Bob Chipman. Both of them promptly threw a fucking shit-fit, arguing that GG discussion had to be banned NOW, lest the evil misogynists win. The duo wanted to make fucking sure that no discussion of the event was going to be allowed without their prevailing narrative to be set in stone going forward.

If this sounds familiar to you, it should, because the thermonuclear version is what Chez Apocalypse did on Channel Awesome.

The problem of course is that the Escapist realized that doing what these two obeasts wanted may not be the best idea. Bob got disciplined repeatedly for his constant antagonism of the Escapist's own audience, and due to his fringe political views, was a fucking nightmare to get along with. Jim meanwhile got so angry when the site refused to censor GG discussion that he quit on the spot, arguing that the site owners had "given a platform to madmen." In reality, I've heard different allegations from people who chose to remain anonymous, who essentially explained that like Bob, Jim wouldn't stop antagonizing the site's audience and was, likewise, a fucking horror-show to get along with, something those familiar with Jim would have little trouble believing. So when he was told to knock it off or leave, he left, whereas Bob kept at it until he got fired and then got fired again when rehired under new management.

Autism war.... Autism war never changes, bros....